So there we were at Muni headquarters on Geary at 9 a.m., knocking on doors.

The lost-and-found was supposed to be open at 9, but it wasn't. We got a guard to let us in, and walked around in a maze of bare corridors until a nice man named Stephen Taylor showed us the lost-and-found.

"People leave everything on the bus," he said. "The other day a woman left $3,000 in cash in an envelope. They leave limbs, bicycles, laptops."

He let us look around at all the unclaimed stuff. Cartons and cartons of keys. A purple Mongoose switchback bike leaning against a row of backpacks. Two sets of matching suitcases. A huge wedding picture. A bag of groceries. Piles of umbrellas, a sprightly collection of cans -- and a fishing pole. There was even a rolled-up Muni cap, brown with red lining, that the driver had forgotten to write his name in.

AS WE WERE poking through the piles, I thought the amazing thing is not that people left their bikes, computers, money and legs on the bus, but that other people picked them up and carried them down the bus aisle and then instead of going down the steps and into the street with them, handed them to the driver.

I told Bill my friend Cecilia's story. She remembers when her boyfriend Freddie moved her furniture in an open U-Haul across the Golden Gate Bridge to Fulton Street while she was at work.

"I emphasized to him to take great care with my box of china and silver. My Georgia peach mother had given them to me, and they were the only possession I valued."

He called her at work. "Your box of china fell off on the bridge," he quavered.

"Ha ha," she said. But it was true.

"The box had flown off when they hit a bump while changing lanes, and they couldn't stop on the bridge," Cecilia said. "So there I was left with a bunch of cheap macrame plant hangers, ferns, wicker chairs, yellow cube tables."

AFTER A MONTH, she got a call from BART. A driver of theirs had seen the box fall and had managed to pick it up. They would deliver it to her flat that evening.

Trembling, that night Cecilia opened the box, not even waiting to take the box into the house. Not a single piece of china had broken -- nothing was even chipped. Nothing had even been unwrapped.

"Good people, as we say in Texas," said Cecilia.

She was so excited that she promptly dropped a plate and saucer.

Later she wrote to BART to thank them, and the driver was given a raise. Cecilia married the U-Haul driver.

The moral, of course, is not that the universe returneth things. People do. Perhaps someone once did it for them -- as someone turned in the red sack containing my money and passport that I once left on the London tube -- and they spend the rest of their lives returning the favor.